Your Money

By Julie Rawe

MUTUAL-FUND VOYEURISM Want to see your money manager in action? Trading activity at OpenFund can be viewed in real-time updates on its Meta-Market.com site. You can even watch the trading floor through a Web camera. The start-up also features online discussions with industry gurus. Coming soon: Stock-Jungle.com's Community Intelligence Fund. This planned mutual fund will choose its holdings on the basis of investors' suggestions, as culled by the fund's managers. SEC approval is pending.

YOUR2CENTS.COM Amazon.com started the trend, and now consumer reviews are expanding. Epinions.com covers everything from fly-fishing to cell phones, and pays reviewers up to 3[cents] each time their reviews are read. The site lets members rate reviewers' trustworthiness, a la eBay, and lists professional reviews below customer ones. BizRate.com compiles customer feedback on e-commerce sites. These online reviews will be published in Consumer Reports beginning in November.

$OCIAL CLUB When it comes to money, boys and girls seem to play better together. A Brown University study tracked hundreds of investment clubs over the past decade and found that stocks picked by mixed-gender groups beat the S&P 500 by nearly 2%--that's a lot--while all-male groups squeaked past the index by 0.56% and all-female groups by 0.28%. Why the difference? Mixed clubs were often formed by co-workers, who were used to achieving goals, while single-sex club members tended to be friends, who didn't want to criticize ideas and hurt one another's feelings.

--By Julie Rawe